Kristallnacht Anniversary, Kindertransport Resources.

Tonight marks 71 years since the two-day Nazi pogrom later known as Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass.

In many ways, the term is a euphemistic preview of the sanitary language the Nazis adopted while carrying out the genocide of the Jews.

In all, the Nazis had close to 20 words for murder, all of which attempted to mask the action’s brutal nature.

In the case of Kristallnacht, while it is true that the glass of shops, synagogues and homes were indeed shattered, the officially sanctioned damage perpetrated across Germany did far worse damage to Jewish people’s lives.

After weathering a storm of international condemnation, Hitler decided to fine the Jews for having their property destroyed.

Although at the Evian conference in June 1938 the Dominican Republic was the only country to open to large-scale Jewish immigration-this was due in large part to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo wanting to lighten his population-the British government did respond after Kristallnacht.

The response eventually was called the Kindertransport, or child transport.  Under this program, about 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia between the ages of 4 to 17 were allowed to enter England.

My father and uncle were two of them.

The Kindertransport has been the subject of a number of books, films and even a play.

I Came Alone is a collection of first-person recollections edited by the indefatigable Bertha Leverton.  Leverton, who just moved to Israel in July at the age of 86 to be nearer her 10 grand children and 16 great-granchildren, was also the driving force behind the Kindertransport reunions that have taken place during the past two decades.

Kindertransport by Diane Samuels is a play that talks about the haunting impact children’s being separated from their parents had on all parties.  Tom Piper, a friend from when I lived in Oxford, England in 1979, did the stage design for one of the play’s original productions in England.

The Children of Willesden Lane, by Mona Golabeck.  This book is told by the daughter of a Kindertransport survivor who recounts her mother’s experience.  Golabeck is an accomplished pianist who at times does a performance piece based on the book.

My Knees Were Jumping, by Melissa Hacker.  This film by the daughter of Academy Award-nominated costume designer Ruth Morley tells the story of her mother’s escape from Germany.

Into the Arms of Strangers, by Deborah Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the producer of this Academy Award-winning film and The George Lopez Show.  The film takes the viewer through various Kinder’s experiences before, during and after the program.

 

 

Nancy Pelosi’s moment and memoir.

Although health care reform may have nowhere to go in the Senate, it cleared a major hurdle yesterday as a compromise bill squeaked by in the House, 220-215.

While some pundits have called the legislation a major victory for President Barack Obama, others are giving far more credit to Nancy Pelosi, the nation’s first female Speaker of the House.

Pelosi’s tenacity, unceasing effort, and blend of persuasion and coercion contributed mightily to the bill’s narrow passage.

If some version of the bill passes in the Senate and is ultimately signed into law by Obama, it may be Pelosi’s signature moment in public service.

Pelosi tells the story of her life and political career in Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters.

Pelosi’s exposure to politics began early.

Her father was Thomas D’Alesandro, was both a Congressman and later Mayor of Baltimore.  Her childhood home included expectations that one could achieve what one wanted provided that one was willing to put in the necessary work.

Whatever her detractors say, and there are many of them, they have to concede her willingness to do the gritty work necessary to get elected and to govern.

Pelosi shares how she did not originally set out to become the nation’s third most powerful elected official, but that she applied the tools she learned in her youth and, as a mother, working to effect change locally through her local PTA.

Her arc and ultimate success is a quintessentially American story, and, as the title implies, one that Pelosi wants young women to know about and absorb.  While waiting for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to decide whether he can marshall a filibuster-proof majority on the Senate side, you might want to read Pelosi’s brief and accessible memoir.

Dart in Atlanta, Day Two

I’m still here in Atlanta, getting ready to head to 2008 Fellow Moni Basu’s house for a dinner party in a few minutes.

Moni has started working for CNN after nearly 20 years at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  One of the last major projects she did while at the paper was an award-winning eight-part series about a minister Iraq called Chaplain Turner’s War.

Also at the party will be Mimi Award winner Jan Winburn, who edited Moni’s project.  Jan previously edited Lisa Pollak’s Pulitzer Prize-winning project about baseball umpire John Hirschbeck.  Hirschbeck, who came to national attention when Roberto Alomar spat on him, had had one child die of a rare disease and another one who had contracted the same ailment.

This year’s fellows seem to be having a fantastic week.

My friend and prolific author Kari Lydersen is one of them.  I have written previously about her book on the Republic Windows and Doors strike and wanted to mention her book, Out of the Sea and Into the Fire.  This is a collection of dispatches written over the course of several years from within the United States and throughout Mexico, Central America and Latin America.  The work includes topics as varied as street performers in Bolivia to a profile of organizer Jose Oliva.  In addition to being thoroughly researched and reported, Lydersen’s work is unusual in that it brings together themes of the environment, social justice and immigration that in many cases are written about and discussed separately.

I had a lengthy conversation last night with Hollman Morris, one of Colombia’s top investigative journalists.  Along with his brother Juan Pablo Morris, Hollman has created Contravia, a series of shows that has focused on, among other topics, the many right-wing paramilitary groups that have been active during the country’s 20-year civil war.  He has received death threats in the forms of funeral wreaths laid at the front door of his home and been denounced by President Alvaro Uribe.   Hollman has had to leave the country multiple times, but continues his efforts to expose the truth behind Colombia’s war and the relationships between many elected officials and financial leaders and the paramilitary groups.

These are just two of this year’s remarkable crop of fellows, and one part of why I feel so privileged to be a part of this community.

Melissa Fay Greene’s Temple Bombing.

I’m here in Atlanta for the Dart Society board meeting and so far am having a terrific time.

Last night, after a spirited conversation about green jobs with Charles Butler of WVON in Chicago, I ate healthy portions of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and collard greens washed down with local brew 420 Extra Pale Ale at local eatery Mary Mac’s.

Fellow board members Deirdre Stoelzle Graves, Scott North, Miles Moffeit, Mike Walter, and Arnessa Garrett were both gracious about my arriving well into the meal due to the interview with Butler and my sources of food!

In addition to recently being named America’s most toxic city by Forbes magazine, Atlanta is also the site of Melissa Fay Greene’s The Temple Bombing.  The book tells the story of the 1958 bombing of one of Atlanta’ reform temples.

Greene paints a vivid picture of Southern Jewish life and the ambivalence they held both toward their religious traditions-she quotes one Southern Jew as asking why the Almighty made barbeque off-limits since it tasted so good-and toward bucking the legal segregation that dominated the region.

Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, who hailed from the North, had for years unsuccessfully prodded his congregation to be more active in civil rights, but the faithful generally did not respond positively, and even displayed flashes of annoyance.

That all changed with the blast.

As America was to discover on a far more massive scale more than four decades later, a seemingly inviolable building was destroyed and a sense of security shattered.

The bombing began a process of the Jewish community shaking off its moral lethargy and becoming more actively involved in combating the oppressive system from which they benefited on a daily basis.

Toward the end of the book, after Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Greene describes a famous dinner that some have called a turning point in race relations took place.  Black and white people sat down together at the table of brotherhood-enacting the vision that King had so memorably invoked the previous year at the March on Washington.

Some of those present were temple members.

Close to half a century later, Atlanta’s race issues have not been fully resolved, as a front-page Atlanta Journal Constitution article about voting for the upcoming mayoral election reminds us.

Still, as Greene writes, “stories of integrity and courage ought to be rescued,” and we are grateful to her for writing about the sometimes prickly rabbi from Pittsburgh who pushed his congregants to look outside themselves and find common cause with their black brothers and sisters.

Steve Early’s reflections on being embedded with organized labor.

Being an “embedded” journalist has negative connotations for many in the industry, but some may change their opinion after reading Steve Early’s book.

A long-time union organizer for the Communication Workers of America,  Early has gathered many of his reviews of labor books and ruminations about things labor in general.  Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home is a  collection that sparkles with Early’s intelligence, many years of experience, perspective and heart.

Many thanks to dear friend and uber-connector Danny Postel for sharing this book with me.  I may add a category of books bearing his name since he has given me so many useful ones!

Early divides his work into six sections, each of which has some introductory text before moving onto the specific articles that comprise that part of the book.

Readers are treated to essays about some of the labor movement’s historic dimensions, the movement’s inconsistent and even tortured relationship with race, class and gender, voices of dissent and reforms, workers’ rights and wrongs, organizing in the global village and changing to win.

Early’s values are evident throughout the book.

His tone shifts at different points from an earnest and informed historian to a disappointed friend to a hopeful brother.  But his belief in the potential for a truly grassroots and democratic union made up of actively reading members in which race, class and gender are seen but do not disqualify people from full participation does not waver.

That Early has attempted to live out his beliefs give his words more credibility.

Embedded with Organized Labor gave me literally dozens of books from which to draw to learn more, knowledge about individuals about whom I had never heard and a clearer sense of the broad narrative arc of labor in the American story.

Such sharing of information could easily be accompanied by arrogance.  However,at no point did I that Early was performing intellectual pirouettes to show off his vast knowledge of the movement.  Rather he is continually sharing and evaluating texts, and the people who wrote them, in an effort to inform, prod and help move people to productive, collective and positively self-interested action.

Early’s got guts, too.

The section of race, class and gender squarely confronts the way in which the movement has fallen short in history and today of reaching some of its loftier ideals,for example.  The failure to deliver on promise shown during the early part of John Sweeney’s New Voice era gets similar treatment.

One of my favorite sections involved the pieces about the growth of SEIU and the anti-democratic and technocratic leadership that he says has emerged under Andy Stern.  These articles were not as book review-oriented as some of the others, but were no less informative for their different focus.

Again, Early’s unyielding commitment to the role of labor and his considerable critical faculties allow him to make these critiques in an unflinching and constructive spirit.

My only quibble is that it would have been helpful to know the where and when of the publication so that we could see his reflections and thought develop over time.

If this is a blemish, it is a small one.

Early will be speaking next Monday night at the No Exit Cafe at an event organized by Postel.  Whether you can make it or not, I urge you to consider purchasing, reading and sharing this valuable and informative book.

The Sports Guy Rests in Peace

I wrote yesterday that I spent a lot of time this weekend with Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy.

This was the product of several factors:

a. Our shared Brookline backgrounds and sports obsessions.

b. His prodigious amounts of writing.

c. My brother Mike’s consideration and generosity in buying both books.

d. My desire to complete tasks and flickering desire to read more books this year than last year.

e. My wife’s indulgence of d.

These factors culminated in my reading all 700-plus pages of The Book of Basketball, Simmons’ new book about hoops, and Now I Can Die in Peace, a paperback and updated version of his baseball writings, which focus almost exclusively on the Red Sox.

They are different types of books.  Now I Can Die is a chronological collection, with introductory essays for each of the five sections that roughly follow the narrative arc of a play, while The Book of Basketball is a full-fledged and largely original work.

The Red Sox book goes back to the late 90s and the Dan Duquette era at Fenway, while the basketball book covers the league’s entire history.

The basketball book’s focus is wider, too.  Simmons writes about the entire game, rather than his understandably complicated relationship with the Red Sox, who at times provoke heartbreaking anguish, frustration, misery and, of course, in 2004, unprecedented and transcendent joy.

All in all, I liked, but did not love, Now I Can Die.  While Sports Guy fans will find all the staples of his writing, and, in fact, can see the germination of some of the idea he develops in his most recent book-enter Keyser Soze here, among others-his knowledge of, and connection to, baseball is different than basketball.

While Simmons knows and understands baseball as much as any other rabid member of Red Sox Nation, he is a true student of the game in basketball.  He saw more games at the Garden than he did at Fenway, the number of players and their roles are different and the Celtics had lots of success at numerous points during his youth, while the Red Sox were living through the final two decades of their 86-year drought.   As a result, I felt I learned more from the basketball than the baseball book.

My preference may also reflect my own relationship with the Boston sports teams.  While I lived and died, mostly the latter, with the Red Sox, the Celtics truly got into my guts and stayed there.  Seeing the Celtics beat LA in Game 7 of the NBA Finals with Mike is a sports moment that will be hard ever to top.

So, while I enjoyed ploughing through Now I Can Die in Peace and felt only slightly like someone who had eaten a whole pepperoni and mushroom pizza compared to the usual five pieces, I preferred Simmons’ The Book of Basketball.

Of course, reasonable people may differ, and I welcome the conversation.

The Sports Guy weighs in on basketball.

You’ve got to hand it to Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy. 

Even if you’re not a Celtics fan, even if you find him incredibly self-promoting, even if you disagree with every single one of his opinions and even if you tire of his endless references to the Rocky series, you have to admit one basic fact.

The man has made a career of being a sports fan.

A passionate, informed and prolifically writing sports fan, to be sure, and, let’s face it, the man is paid to watch, talk and write about sports.

Plenty of sportswriters do this, too, but Simmons is different to the extent that he is a fan first and foremost.   

I’ve got some grounds to make this statement because I spent a lot of time with Simmons this past weekend, thanks to my brother Mike, who gave me The Sports Guy’s newly released tome, The Book of Basketball.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

While I cannot make it to his appearance today here in Chicago, I recommend that others consult his book tour schedule and go in other cities.

In part, my pleasure in reading Simmons stems from the fact that I get to relive cherished parts of my childhood. 

We spent large chunks of his youth in Brookline, came of age during the 70s Red Sox and 80s Celtics era, and loved deeply our hometown teams and the endless statistics that came with following sports.

Larry Bird has a permanent place in our Sports Pantheon.

When he writes in The Book of Basketball about a game where Bird waved his arms to a hostile Clippers crowd before shooting game-winning free throws, for example, I remember watching that with best friend Pete D’Angelo.

The intersecting nature of our childhoods aside, I liked The Book of Basketball because it shows Simmons in all his passionate, knowledgeable and at times excessive fullness.

To begin, the book is 700 pages long-a fact that he mentions both in the footnotes toward the end and in the acknowledgments, when he quotes his wife, The Sports Gal, saying, in essence, that she will leave him if he ever proposes to write another book of similar length.

Readers who follow Simmons’ columns will find a lot of recycled material in the book, and there is much that is new.

He has a five-tier Hall of Fame and identifies the 75 players who should occupy those levels.   He takes the reader through the league’s history.  He has lengthy discussions of the best teams of all time-a list that culminates, unsurprisingly, with the 1986 Boston Celtics.

Readers of Simmons’ previous work will find all the same ingredients: heavy doses of discussions with his father; plenty of self-referential interactions with everyone from Elgin Baylor to Tom Seaver to Bill Walton; lots of popular culture references; pinches of phrases like “Stick a fork in him”; and plenty of lists with criteria attached to them and the people or teams who fit them.

I skimmed certain parts of the history and will say that I read most, but not all, of the footnotes.  And, to be sure, the book has its shortcomings.

His jokes and repeated digs at his “Grumpy Old Editor” aside, Simmons really could have written the same book at a little more than half the length.  He asserts in several places that you know something is meaningful when you remember where you were when it happened-a proposition that need not be true, and, even if it is, probably does not bear repeating.

His criteria shift, but are argued with equal conviction. 

He says that Bill Walton deserves to be on the list of Hall of Famers because of the brilliance he showed for a short time, but later gives Karl Malone the edge over Charles Barkley because Malone fulfilled his lesser potential while Barkley did not play at his highest level for long periods of time.

While Simmons does talk about the size of Dennis Johnson’s ”equipment,” he neglected to include one of my favorite nuggets about DJ that Jim D’Angelo pointed out-that he picked his spots to the point where he did not score at all in the first half, but ended up with 17 points and a number of big steals in the 118-116 1988 Game 7 victory over the Atlanta Hawks that is most known for the Bird-Dominique duel. 

But, in many ways, each of these criticisms both are what Simmons wants, an engaged readership, but, more than that, underscores the very point that he is able to write what he wants because it is HIS BOOK.

Near the end of the work, Simmons writes with just a slight tongue in cheek tone that The Book of Basketball is the second-best book about hoops ever.  I don’t know about that, but I do know that I am very grateful to my brother for sending me this fantastic birthday present and I am grateful to Simmons for caring and writing about sports as much as he does.

Sandra Cisneros remembers living on Mango Street.

Dunreith, Ava and I went to see The House on Mango Street last night at the Steppenwolf Theatre.

The play is a musical adaptation of Sandra Cisneros‘ classic book by the same name.

I found out about the play through Dunreith’s meeting Tanya Saracho, who adapted the book to the stage, at a professional lunch.

The co-founder of Teatro Luna, Saracho poke in an interview in the play’s program bill about the impact the book had on her as a young Latina.

While it may be hard for some to believe, it’s been a full 25 years since Mango Street was first published.

A combination of autobiography and the compilation of stories Cisneros heard while working with at-risk teenagers, the book is a collection of vignettes told through the eyes of Esperanza, a bookish girl who moves with her family to a ramshackle house on Mango Street after stops in many different locations  (In the play’s opening and closing numbers, the cast members sing the street names of where the family lived before concluding. “Before that/I don’t remember.”).

Cisneros’ book shows in moving and unflinching the detail the challenges Esperanza faces in navigating the demands her family places on her as the oldest child and a girl, the physical changes her body is going through as a budding young woman, the difficulties of making friends in a new neighborhood and the perils of the street.

Saracho’s approach is a combination of straight lifting from the text of the book -one of my favorite chapters, where Esperanza talks about her name, is an example of this-and taking some liberties with the spirit of it through the dialogue, musical numbers and meditations that Esperanza often shares while sitting or standing near the skinny tree with bony elbows that stands outside her house.

All in all, the play, which runs until November 8 and which was intended largely for young adult audiences, came off quite well.

It certainly made me want to go back and take another look at the slender volume that launched Cisneros’ career and that has been a source of affirmation for countless young women in similar situations.

Mitch Albom learns to have a little faith.

You remember Mitch Albom.

The guy from Tuesdays with Morrie? The Detroit sportswriter who had lost his way in Detroit and in life in general and needed participating in his favorite professor’s struggle with ALS to get him back to what was important in life?

After the phenomenal success of Morrie, which lead to the posthumous publication of a book by Schwartz, Albom has had a television show and written several successful novels.

For my birthday, my mom got me Have a Little Faith, Albom’s most recent foray into non-fiction.

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised and moved.

The book essentially tells three stories during an eight-year period.  The first is of Albert Lewis, Albom’s childhood rabbi who asks him to write his eulogy when that time comes. Albom agrees on the condition that he get to know Lewis.   The second is the story of Henry Covingtion, a Christian preacher in Detroit who took a long and very hard road to the pulpit.  The third, of course, if Albom’s recounting of his own experience with, and journey toward, an authentic, rather than received, faith.

Albom is a sportswriter to his core and Have a Little Faith bears that imprint.  The book’s short chapters move briskly along as he alternates getting to know Lewis and his gradual acceptance, and later embrace, of Covington.  He also intersperses excerpts from Lewis’ sermons over the years.

There are major differences between the two men.

Covington is a former addict, drug dealer and felon who spent years in prison for a murder charge he says he did not commit.  Lewis, while failing once to gain admission to the rabbinical academy, had no brushes with the law.  Lewis is relatively fit, while Covington is enormously overweight.  Covington is black, while Lewis is white.  And Lewis’ congregation has close to 1,000 families and sufficient money while Covington’s flock is tiny by comparison and is in a building with a large hole in the roof.

That said, Albom does show similarities between the two men.

Both men toil tirelessly for their G-d and are much loved by their congregants.  Both have one wife and the same number of children.  And both in some way touch Albom and force him to confront his own skepticism toward organized religion and spiritual belief.

Have a Little Faith is filled with poignant details about Lewis’ courage in the face of his gradual but inevitable physical decline and of Covington’s relentless search for redemption for the nefarious acts he committed earlier in his life.   To his credit, Albom does show both his initial hesitation toward Covington because of his past and his movement toward a different attitude-a move that is propelled by hearing one of Covington’s churchgoers explain the man’s impact on his life.

By the end, the sermon for which Lewis asked is largely an afterthought.  Albom deserves credit for this latest in his many stories and books that remind us of where life’s meaning resides through his relationships with these two leaders who had very different life histories but arrived at much the same place by the book’s end.

Jeff Haas revisits the murder of Fred Hampton

December will mark 40 years since Fred Hampton was murdered in bed with his pregnant fiancee.

Jeff Haas, co-founder of the People’s Law Office, spent the following dozen years waging a battle to bring his killers to justice and to expose the collaboration between the Chicago Police Department and the FBI through its notorious COINTELPRO program.

Haas shares his memories of, and reflections on, that at times seemingly interminable journey in The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.

Many thanks to friend Craig Segal for informing me about the book and to Jen Wisnowski of the Independent Publishers Group for getting it to me.

Haas intersperses his personal experience with his professional efforts to hold Hampton’s killers accountable.  Born to a Jewish family in the South, he is raised with a sense of morality and a desire to do right in the world-qualities that he attributes in large part to his mother.

There were plenty of wrongs to right in the 1960s, which is when Haas came of age. 

He effectively describes the radical and increasingly polarized temper of the time.  At times appears to be reflecting on his enduring ambivalence about his theoretical belief in the necessity of violence to achieve needed social change and his unwillingness to commit such actions himself.  He notes that Weathermen members like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers similarly came from wealthy backgrounds and did take such action-at one point, leading the death of Ayers’ girlfriend at the time.

A related tension between whether one can legitimately live a middle class lifestyle and still have robust relationship with radical also ends up contributing to the demise of Haas’ first marriage.

This personal is prelude and deeply connected to Haas’ political beliefs.  He is deeply disturbed by the death of the charismatic Hampton, who was coming to prominence at a time when the national Black Panther movement was starting to wane.

Haas demonstrates convincingly throughout the book’s five sections that Hampton was assassinated in cold blood by the Chicago police and the FBI, that both parties attempted a poorly executed cover-up and that Judge Sam Perry was fervently against the efforts by Haas and his colleague Flint Taylor to expose the true nature of what happened.

Haas has a rich array of characters and gripping material to work with, and makes a lot of the opportunity.  He is not an overly impressive stylist and his ability to recall in precise detail conversations he had more than 30 years ago can raise an eyebrow or two, but the book moves quickly along and with increasing pace as he gets deeper and deeper into the legal proceedings.

Vindication of a sort arrives at the end of the legal odyssey.  Fortunately, Haas’ and Hampton’s mother lived long enough both to see the verdict when it finally came and to live today.

Haas will be reading from the book and participating in a high-powered panel at Northwestern University’s Thorne Hall next Thursday night. 

Panelists include Prexy Nesbitt, Martha Biondi, Salim Muwakkil and fellow Kuumba Lynx Board Member David Stovall, among others. Dohrn will moderate. 

At a time when some in Chicago are congratulating themselves for the city’s having contributed heavily to the election of the nation’s first black president, it is useful to read this account of a darker and bloodier time by a man who was there and who sought redress for one of the era’s heinous crimes.